From kindergarten, every Israeli child hears that the four species are likened to the people of Israel: those that have taste and smell, those that have one or the other, and those that have nothing – but they all become one association, because our strength is in our unity, etc. Only because of allegories, we forgot that above all it is about taking a variety of agricultural crops, different types of plants from four different geographical areas, on the most agricultural holiday in the calendar. In the distant past, before 90% of the country’s inhabitants lived in urban settlements and the total number of agricultural workers had shrunk to less than 40 thousand Israelis (another 25 thousand foreign workers and 17 thousand Palestinians), the celebrations for the end of an agricultural year, alongside the worries and prayers for the opening A new winter season, were at the center of the celebrations on the Asif holiday.
And if agriculture is at the top of our happiness, we should also talk about a swindle called agriculture, which often uses ethos and tradition to hinder the country’s progress. A country that was founded by urbanites who desperately wanted to be farmers, that made manual labor a sublime ideal, is finding it difficult to come down from the tall tree that it itself planted in its early days. So we talk here constantly about the future of agriculture, about quotas and agricultural crops, but most of the debates and fights between the urban and agricultural sectors are actually conducted over real estate issues. The main fight is over rights and land value – not about egg quotas and the quality of milk. Maybe this is not just an anecdote , that the song that won the countless parades held at the end of the last Hebrew year was “Stalbet in a kibbutz”. A song that emphasizes the advantages of cheap and comfortable living in a kibbutz, without a word about fulfilling the vision of Zionism in a shack or a coop. “How stressful it is, so why a city. You can decide on a kibbutz, at half price.”
From the song “Stalbat in the Kibbutz” which is at the top of the charts / photo: YouTube
The real battle for land is in the kibbutzim
Situation picture: In recent years, the kibbutzim have been waging a veritable war to increase the residential lots, before the kibbutzim are finally privatized. Maximum space, at a minimum price. This is for the benefit of houses that the new members can later inherit and trade on, which of course will allow those kibbutzniks, many of whom will at most grow a few pots, to make a huge fortune at the expense of the general public – who own the lands (and were only leased to the kibbutz in the distant past) and are eager to supply construction for everyone. The moshavs are also busy curbing the plans of the cities to expand at the expense of agricultural areas, at the same time there are quite a few negotiations to receive land for development with an exemption from a tender, in order to make a real estate round on them by selling them to entrepreneurs who will increase the price.
The estates that break up families, and the profession
And before the national, economic and state question, the real estate issue – everyone’s difficulty in dealing with the fact that tens of thousands of farmers leased thousands of dunams decades ago that are worth a huge fortune today – is also tearing these communities apart from the inside. When so much money is at stake, dealing with The older generation for the residents who recently came, or when faced with the question of the rights of the members of the second generation who left and want to return, etc., is much more complex. Perhaps the anachronistic estate regime in the moshavim is the best example of the urgent need to overhaul systems. Even today, an agricultural estate in a moshav usually includes about 30 A dunam. On the one hand, it is not really possible to develop modern agriculture on an estate that does not include hundreds of dunams. On the other hand, it is not possible to divide the same estate among the different children. What do we do? In practice, a model that fantasizes about an agricultural farm that will pass from father to son, mainly tears families apart (the constraint to choose a “continuing son” for the family estate), or he forces the children to sell the estate to the highest bidder, usually a wealthy owner looking for land on which to build a spacious house with a huge garden, which of course further ridicules the nature of the rural settlement. And as with too many explosive issues In a country without governance, everyone prefers to keep rolling the dice And the hot earth. Continue to call these community settlements kibbutzim and moshavim, and postpone more and more the much needed reform in the agricultural sector.
And if the government has already been mentioned, it is impossible to ignore the cries and the demand for the state to finally deal with the nationalist crime against the farmers. Those heroes who are still trying to earn a living and work in agriculture. In the evening of last Yom Kippur, the agricultural terrorism recorded another sad chapter, when an agricultural farm in Moshav Machola in the Jordan Valley was set on fire and went up in flames. How ridiculous is the situation? We have become accustomed to the reality that an organization called “The New Guard” operates in Israel, which operates throughout the country an army of volunteers who guard the lands cultivated by farmers. Somehow it seems logical to us that in the sovereign state of Israel, the citizens are forced to revive an organization that operated in the second decade of the last century, when Alexander Zeid walked with a horse and a gun between communes and when only a few crazy people dreamed that a real state, army and police would be established here.